PMS hits.
So familiar a sentence, and yet I'm drowning just as hard as I ever have.
You'd think a monstre could swim through this, every trick of optimism so ingrained that believing in the fey that run on their little clawed feet through my curls as I sleep is a short skip away. Most days.
PMS hits, and it still takes too many minutes for the letters to flash big and red and angry ACHTUNG! through the forefront of my shambled thinking.
It should be instant, opening my eyes to the morning the one time each month when I am not thrilled to be awake, when I am not eager to conquer the tricks and tumbles of the day before me.
The feeling of wanting to climb back into bed and never again raise my lids to the towering walls of ash around me is familiar, but so many years have passed since it has been constant, pervasive.
And yet, one day a month, two if I haven't been careful with my calcium intake,
I die again.
It terrifies me that the depths of this pain is so purely chemical, a slight dip in my hormones and my vision is plagued with the worst of everything.
This morning, when Arn� told us that he wouldn't be able to make the party they'd planned that had touched me so deeply yesterday, (their intention had been to throw a surprise party to celebrate my return from savage canadian lands and the very notion blew my spirits open), my reaction wasn't a simple "don't worry about it, we'll do it tomorrow...", although that is precisely what I said aloud.
And this morning I wandered into work, late again and utterly unmotivated, I wandered into a mailbox full of wonder -- replies from stuffy business men finally responding to my ideas, and such a barrage of love and eye-widening wonder...
And yet I am still sitting here, desperate not to cry.
One day a month, like a religious fast, to remind me just how fortunate my perpetual state of joyfulness is.
One day a month to remind me what it feels like to live in doubt and pain and a constant state of disappointment.
One day a month to remind me the horror that simply being alive and mobile can be.
THere is nothing different in me today but a handful of hormones, and yet every word spoken has poisoned barbs, every time I lean back to bask in the sheer magic that is having met him, that is knowing him so deeply, every time I realize how many fortunes have fallen into my hands
Only today, I find myself wondering if I'm not deluding myself, wanting things because I am supposed to want them.
But at least by this late hour, forty minutes to noon, I have finally realized that these sharp whispers scorching my ears are utterly untrustworthy, not the rest of my joyfulness.
And in so realizing, I am slowly feeling them recede, consciousness beating back the dark, rolling, waves.
Fred is asking me for favours he knows only I can do, Anna Maria is desperate to spend five minutes alone over coffee, and the most wonderful man in the world spend all of yesterday afternoon making poetic love to me by spilling out his soul in words.
And slowly I am beginning to even remember that no matter the state of many things, Steven, and Princess, and even a handful of uber-important others,
will always have a good thought for me.
Knowing the meaning of Namaste changes tout, and I will sit here and steadfastly refuse this doubt until it wanders from me with sinewy tails tucked between coarse legs.